Twitter Fights "Occupy" Court Order

[Thunderous Cacophony]

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Perhaps then this is a personal matter we won't be able to get over. I understand why you think this is private speech, but I still think it's public. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Occupy, I can at least appreciate someone who sticks to their guns and stand by what they say instead of cases like this where suddenly they act as if none of it ever happened. Either stick to what you say or don't say it at all.

I can't help wonder how it feels to be an American these days. Those 'Freedoms' have got to start being few and far between now, aren't they?

Wouldn't know, I'm Canadian. Still, I'm pretty sure even despite it's glaring flaws American citizens are no less free then anyone else.

First off, high fives all around for that civil little debate:

Spoiler

Eternal Lament, the issue is not that Malcolm Harris is trying to take back what he said; the issue is that the City of New York is trying to get him to divulge 3 months of tweets (September 15th through December 31st, 2011) as well as all his personal information, for a disorderly conduct violation (which is even lower than a misdemeanor).

If it was just asking for a small amount of data about the incident in question, it wouldn't be a problem, (for instance, if they were trying to get access to a single abusive tweet) but the city is trying to get massive amounts of unrelated information which was removed from public record. I don't know why it was removed from Twitter (maybe he closed his account?) but I think it's important to protect this guy's right to a massive amount of information relating to his personal life, some of which was always private and some of which was public but has since been removed, against a massive abuse of search & seizure laws over a tiny infraction for no well-explained reason.

EDIT: Arec Balrin pointed something out that I didn't see until after posting, and that's that this data was never fully public in the first place. It was shared with a relatively small group of people who follow Harris, and with Twitter, both of whom have the power to stop people from looking at the tweet while it is still on the site. (I think, I don't use Twitter so I'm a little hazy on the rules) SO to use an example from the conversation you two were having before, it's less about putting flyers up on street signs for anyone to see and trying to tear them down later, and more about sharing them with some friends and then later going around and collecting all the copies.

 

[Eternal_Lament]

Large Snip

First, thanks for the high-five. Way I see it there's no sense at yelling or acting childish if you're actually trying to talk rather than to troll.

Anyways, I guess I'm looking at it more from the perspective of how investigators and judges would phrase this. The guy was part of Occupy, so I could see the argument that, if he was one of the more disorderly members of Occupy, any tweets during this time could hypothetically be considered as "data relating to the incident". Seeing however that Harris himself says that the prosecution is looking for stuff directly related to whatever he did on Sept. 17, it makes me think that the disorder charge is in fact a lesser charge because the police care less about the charge and more about how the charge could lead them to looking into another case Harris is related to. I guess for me I see it more as standard procedure we see with other cases unfortunately meeting the hurdle of current technology. I'm not unsympathetic to the consequences to this, but at the same time I can't say it's also out-of-bounds.

As for the Twitter thing, I'm unclear myself actually. I don't actually use it, as in I don't tweet and therefore don't know if there are any privacy settings, however I do know that you don't need to follow someone or even have a Twitter account to read someone's tweets. It's possible some tweets are only available to select individuals, but nothing we've heard so far suggests that is what happened here.

 

[Chris Terrell]

america is not the land of the free it is the land of "you will do what I tell you, you can do".